Abstract
Research on bilingual word recognition suggests that lexical access is nonselective with respect to language, i.e., that word representations of both languages become active during recognition. One piece of evidence supporting nonselective access is that bilinguals recognize cognates (words that are identical or similar in form and meaning in two or more languages) faster than noncognates. In fact, any difference between how cognates and ‘monolingual’ words are processed by multilinguals would indicate that the other, currently irrelevant language must have played a role as well, at least as long as the two groups of words are comparable with respect to all dimensions other than language membership. The aim of the present paper is to report on two visual perceptual experiments conducted within the lexical decision task paradigm whose aim was to test the assumptions concerning the special position of cognates (the cognate facilitation effect, cf. Dijkstra, 2005) within a trilingual mind and to answer the question whether trilinguals rely upon their second language lexical knowledge when recognizing L3 words. The results of the experiments attest to simultaneous activation and parallel processing as well as interaction among all the three languages. At the same time, they point to the fact that cross-linguistic lexical access and the source and strength of transfer may be constrained by variables such task demands.
Highlights
The majority of empirical evidence gathered in psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic studies seem to support the contention that during bilingual lexical access, even if the two languages are represented differently, both are activated, perhaps to different degrees
A multitude of previous studies carried out in different languages suggests that the distinction between cognate and noncognate translations is consequential to the processing of this type of words and can be relevant
reaction time (RT) exceeding two times the standard deviation from the item mean counted as outliers and were excluded from the set of valid responses
Summary
The majority of empirical evidence gathered in psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic studies seem to support the contention that during bilingual lexical access, even if the two languages are represented differently, both are activated, perhaps to different degrees (cf. De Bot, Lowie, & Verspoor, 2007; Dijkstra, 2007). According to the BIA+ model (Dijkstra & Van Heuven, 2002a), the visual presentation of a word to a bilingual person leads to parallel activation of orthographic input representations both in the native language (L1) and in the second language (L2). More and more studies (cf De Bot et al, 2007; Lemhöfer et al, 2008) have reported evidence in support of language nonselective access with respect to form (orthographic and phonological) as well as semantic representations. Empirical studies show that neighbours from both the same and the other language are activated during the presentation of a target word This provides evidence that, with respect to orthographic codes, the lexicon of bilinguals is integrated and nonselective in nature. The data coming from cross-linguistic priming and repetition effect tasks (cf. Altarriba & Basnight-Brown, 2009; Basnight-Brown & Altarriba, 2007) clearly support the nonselective access view
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